Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst (Riverhead; $25.95)

Darst’s father spent his entire life planning to write a novel, and made a career of avoiding steady work, leaving his family in relative poverty. This memoir is a darkly comic account of a childhood spent in the shadow of a well-meaning father’s literary aspirations and an alcoholic mother’s depression. By her teen-age years, Darst was both writing and drinking heavily, and grows up to be, as she describes it, “an alcoholic, broke, occasionally irresistible, destructive, quasi-adult—one who believed that writing was at least partly what was causing my life to fall apart but also that it was what would redeem it in the end.” She gets sober, and learns that she can write sober, too. Occasionally, Darst’s weakness for comic anecdotes sits oddly with the general picture of a family’s decline, but the book is highly entertaining. ♦